What We Can Say, Preludes and Fugues for Keyboard (2020) — Robert Adámy Duisberg (United States)
“One is trying to say everything
that can be said for the things one loves
while there is still time.”
– W. S. Merwin
Prelude: Listen / With the night falling / We are saying thank you
Fugue: The first composer could hear / Only what he could write
Interlude: We have been here so short a time / and we pretend that we have invented memory
Fugue: With nobody listening we are saying thank you / dark though it is
Contrapuntal music has always afforded a contemplative refuge in its evocative intellectual and emotional forms. These preludes and fugues are essays in harmony and counterpoint, enlivening and genre’s formalism with expressive gestures.
The set includes four linked movements developing an emotional arc of transfiguration. Lines follow their own independent tonal implications into sharp clashes of tension and release. Through these crucibles of poignant polytonal dissonance, the music invites us to take hopeful steps into resolution.
The transformation moves us from grieving what is lost into gratitude for the fragile preciousness of all that is: a transcendent response in a time of collapse. W. S. Merwin’s poem “Thanks” – the source of some movements’ epigrams – engages this paradoxical transformation, as it sings of gratitude in the face of the darkest visions.
The first fugue predates the other pieces in this set by more than a decade. Merwin’s poetry has always called us toward salvation of the natural world. In the 1990s, the great poet laureate gave a reading on an island near my home. I had the honor of a conversation with him in which I impertinently asked his permission to set some of his text to music. To my surprise, he smiled warmly, saying, “That is simply between you and the poetry.” The result was a choral version of this fugue, in which the epigram of the ‘First Composer’ is sung as the fugue subject. Ten years later, at another reading in Seattle, I humbly presented that score to him, expressing doubt he’d remember his generous permission. Warmly again, fixing me with his penetrating eye contact, he said, “Of course I remember!”
The first prelude delights in the world’s grace, nonetheless weaving into dark implications, and forecasts the fugue. The fugue subject is elegaic yet inviting in its rising fourths. Its climactic resolution is to an emphatic “Chord of Nature” in C major.
The interlude begins stretching time like breath itself. Its rhapsodic central section introduces a two-note motif, a simple rising major second. This hopeful step pirouettes from there into a yearning gesture. This motif comes into dominance as the second theme of the double fugue, resolving ultimately into a pure yet unstable consonance. We take a step. We do what we can:
“with nobody listening we are saying thank you / … dark though it is.”
Robert Adámy Duisberg, formerly on faculty at the University of Washington (UW) School of Music, is the founding director of the West Seattle Community Orchestras (WSCO), where he is now composer in residence. He has had orchestral works performed by the Seattle Symphony and Flagstaff Symphony as well as WSCO. A body of theatre music including an opera, an oratorio, and three musicals have been performed and recorded at ACT Theatre, Civic Light Opera and the UW. His chamber music has been released on Crystal Records, S-342, and his violin sonata has been widely performed.
A group of as yet unperformed choral motets — settings of poetry of U.S. Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin — are closely related to these more abstract preludes and fugues for keyboard, and their themes are connected through Merwin’s expressions of deep ecology and the longing for environmental restoration.
Duisberg is currently at work on a piece for the WSCO Wind Symphony, entitled “Salmon to the Salish Sea,” a programmatic piece depicting the waters of the Duwamish River, and Salmon’s journey downstream, where she encounters the People, and ultimately the conflict of the industrial harbor, before merging into the vast and mysterious tides of the Salish Sea.
More information about the composer and his music can be found and heard at www.robduisberg.org.
Ann DuHamel 